Ups and Downs

A letter in response to Adam Gopnik’s article (September 12, 2011)

There’s no certainty that the United States will ever overcome all its present ills, but I’m inclined to agree with Adam Gopnik that “nothing like us ever happened before.” (“Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat,” September 12th). One reason we can’t easily be pigeonholed into patterns of history is the prescience of our Founding Fathers, who crafted the uniquely principled framework that has enabled us to survive profound national traumas ranging from the deeply divisive Civil War to the deprivations of the Great Depression and on to the transformation of “separate but equal” into meaningful racial integration. Oswald Spengler’s notion that physics was finished as a science in 1918 reminds me of the myth of the U.S. patent officer who resigned because he thought that everything useful had already been invented. Current naysayers are likewise premature in chronicling our demise. The United States is a country continuously struggling for its soul, a land of both eternal promise and paradox. We’ve pursued—and largely achieved—a greater degree of genuine civil liberty than any other nation on earth. That is and always has been one true measure of our prosperity.